The Weeping Web of January 2017 (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my previous article, “The Weeping Web of January 2017 (Part 1)“. It describes more frustrating experiences with websites in 2017, a time when websites and web developers should have supposedly reached a certain level of maturity. Some of the entries here were contributed by other people, and others are from my own experiences.

EA Origin Store

When resetting your password on the EA Origin Store, the new password you choose has a maximum length validation. In this particular case, your password cannot be longer than 16 characters.

This is an incredibly stupid practice, for two reasons. First, we should be encouraging people to use longer passwords, because that makes them harder to brute force. Secondly, any system that is properly hashing its passwords (or, even better, using a hash algorithm plus work factor) will know that the result of a hashed password is a fixed length string (regardless of original input length), so this is not subject to any maximum column length in a database.

Untangled Media

If you scroll through the pictures of the team at Untangled Media, you’ll see that the last one is broken. Ironically, it seems that that person is responsible for content.

Needless to say, broken images give a feeling of neglect that is reminiscent of the mythical broken window from The Pragmatic Programmer.

Outlyer on Eventbrite

Another thing that makes sites (and any written content, for that matter) look unprofessional is typos. If you’re sending an SMS to a friend, a typo might be acceptable. If you’re organising an event to launch a product, three typos in the same sentence don’t give a very good impression.

BRND WGN

The first thing you see on the BRND WGN website is an animation taking up the whole screen, switching around frantically like it’s on drugs:

There are only three things you can do to learn more about what the site has to offer: play a video, click on (literally) a hamburger menu, or scroll down.

While I’m not sure this can be reasonably classified as mystery meat navigation, it does no favours to the visitor who has to take additional actions to navigate the site. While the hamburger icon looks like a cutesy joke, it looks silly on what is supposed to be a professional branding website, and hides the site’s navigation behind an additional layer of indirection.

This is a real pity, because if you scroll to the bottom, the site actually does have well laid out navigation links you can use to get around the site! These should really be the first thing a visitor sees; it makes no sense that they are hidden at the bottom of the page.

I also noticed that if you click on that hand in the bottom-right, you get this creepy overlay:

Daphne Caruana Galizia

The controversial journalist and blogger who frequently clashes with public figures would probably have a bone to pick with her webmaster if she knew that the dashboard header for her WordPress site was visible for not-logged-in users while she was logged in last week:

While this won’t let anyone into the actual administrative facilities (because a login is still requested), there’s no denying that something went horribly wrong to make all this visible, including Daphne’s own username (not shown here for security reasons).

Identity Malta

The Identity Malta website has some real problems with its HTTPS configuration. In fact, Firefox is quick to complain:

This analysis from Chrome, sent in by a friend, shows why:

Ouch. It defeats the whole point of using SSL certificates if they are not trusted. But that’s not all. Running a security scan against the site reveals the following:

Not only is the certificate chain incomplete, but the scan identified a more serious vulnerability (obfuscated here). An institution dealing with identity should be a little more up to speed with modern security requirements than this.

Another (less important) issue is with the site’s rendering. As you load the page the first time or navigate from one page to another, you’ll notice something happening during the refresh, which is pretty much this:

There’s a list of items that gets rendered into a horizontally scrolling marquee-like section:

Unfortunately, this transformation is so slow that it is noticeable, making the page load look jerky at best.

Battle.net

I personally hate ‘security’ questions, because they’re insecure (see OWASP page, engadget summary of Google study, and Wired article). Nowadays, there’s the additional trend of making them mandatory for a password reset, so if you forget the answer (or intentionally provide a bogus one), you’re screwed and have to contact support.

If you don’t know the answer to the silly question, you can use a game’s activation code (haven’t tried that, might work) or contact support. Let’s see what happens when we choose the latter route.

Eventually you end up in a form where you have to fill in the details of your problem, and have to provide a government-issued photo ID (!). If you don’t do that, your ticket gets logged anyway, but ends up in a status of “Need Info”:

The idea is that you need to attach your photo ID to the ticket. However, when you click on the link, you are asked to login:

…and that doesn’t help when the problem was to login in the first place.

It’s really a pain to have to go through all this crap when it’s usually enough to just hit a “Reset Password” button that sends you an email with a time-limited reset link. Your email is something that only you (supposedly) have access to, so it identifies you. If someone else tried to reset your password, you just ignore the email, and your account is still fine. In case your email gets compromised, you typically can use a backup email address or two-factor authentication involving a mobile device to prove it’s really you.

Security questions are bullshit; they provide a weak link in the security chain and screw up user experience. Let’s get rid of them sooner rather than later.

Malta Health Department

It is a real pity when a government department’s website loses the trust supposedly provided by HTTPS just because it uses a few silly images that are delivered over HTTP.

On a Positive Note, Mystery Meat Navigation

I’m quite happy to see that mystery meat navigation (MMN) seems to be on its way out, no doubt due to the relatively recent trend of modern webites with simple and clear navigation. I haven’t been able to find any current examples of MMN in the first five pages of Google results when searching for local web design companies, so it’s clear that the local web design industry has made great strides compared to when I wrote the original MMN article.

Summary

This is the third article in which I’ve been pointing out problems in various websites, both local and international. After so many years of web development, designs might have become prettier but lots of websites are still struggling with fundamental issues that make them look amateurish, dysfunctional or even illegal.

Here are some tips to do things properly:

If you’re accepting sensitive data such as credit cards of passwords as input, you have to have fully-functional HTTPS.

Protect yourself against SQL injection by using parameterised queries or a proper ORM.

Test your website. Check various kinds of inputs, links, and images. Don’t waste people’s time or piss them off.